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LATER ARS ANTIQUA 379
evolving the conductus and the motet; for the conductus is essentially
syllabic, while the very purpose of the original motet, according to
one interpretation, was that a syllable should be given to each note
of a florid melody. This process we saw at work earlier in the develop
ment of the sequence (Chapter V), and it will be found again later in
attempts to devise a new genre in English church music in and after
1547. Only in the case of the sequences did the syllabic treatment
endure: both in medieval composition and in Elizabethan church
music it withered rapidly, for it had no real root in aesthetic principle.
The procedure in the later ars antiqua, with its advances in notation,
seems to have been something like this: that so long as the written
notes are of indeterminate length, as in those modal patterns which
have been used hitherto, we cannot expect to find, and in practice we
do not find, that it was feasible to think or to write in more than two
degrees of time long and short. It has been noted above (p. 368)
that there is an occasional, sporadic appearance of very short notes
in certain anomalous ligatures or conjuncturae of English modal
notation. These are described as semibreves by later theorists, but not
by the actual practitioners (notatores) themselves. It is true to say,
broadly speaking, that the long and short notes were the sum total
of the early thirteenth-century equipment in units of duration. And
the time was ripe for a forward movement, possible now that musi
cians were free from the essentially ambiguous character of the modal
notation in certain contexts: for in the modal period it would still
have been necessary for the singers in many cases to know beforehand
what the rhythm was, and sight-singing in parts could not yet have
been an accomplished fact.
MENSURAL NOTATION
By stages, it would seem, and not by any flash of inventive genius
on the part of any one man, the idea of attaching definite time-values
to definite shapes of single or compound notes found its expression.
As happens so often in ancient and medieval history, an eponymous
teacher had to be provided, whose name could be a peg on which to
hang the wreath of honour for the new doctrines. For this honour
Franco of Cologne was selected, just as Guido of Arezzo had been
chosen some two hundred years earlier as inventor of the staff,
Notker for the sequence, and Boethius for alphabetical notation. The
idea of mensural notation, however, was known and used some time
before Franco, who wrote about 1260: the actual documents ad
mitted to be 'Franconian' are now reduced to a very few, such as